I know you’re busy this time of year, so I’ll get right to the point. Your jolly workshop is in a pretty vulnerable location as climate changes, so I hope that you, Mrs. Claus, the reindeer, and the elves are doing what you can to stay resilient.

In this new cartoon series, Villains in the Air, you’ll get to know air pollutants and see what they have to say for themselves. This first installment takes a look at particulate matter, or aerosols, finding that big hazards can come in small packages.

It is always with a tinge of sadness that I say goodbye to the SOARS protégés at the end of summer. But it is also with pride that I look at how far these vibrant, talented students have come in just eleven short weeks.

For my first blog entry for UCAR, I would like to share a bit about sundogs (also called mock suns or parhelia). I got a good look at this atmospheric phenomena out the window of a bus on my way to Boulder, CO on a morning in April, 2014.

Ice is slippery, causing cars and trucks to skid out of control. You can safely explore how cars slip on ice by making a model of an icy road and testing out how well the wheels of toy cars grip onto the ice.

When it’s freezing outside, it can be icy too. People walking down the street find their feet sliding in directions that they didn’t intend. A few unlucky ones slip and fall. But have you ever wondered why we slip?

At Boulder's climate station, 14.6 inches of rain fell between September 9, and early morning, September 13, 2013. Most of that rain (more than 9 inches) fell on September 12. That’s a lot, right? Or is it?

Friday, May 31, 2013 is a day that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I didn’t see my first tornado, but this was my first encounter with an Oklahoma supercell thunderstorm. I experienced so many different emotions during the day.

Severe thunderstorms needed to happen during the MPEX field campaign for it to be a success. I never had this thought until after several deadly tornadoes tore across central Oklahoma in May while we were studying the storms.

Equity and access in education are BIG topics, and for good reason. At a time when the achievement gap between rich and poor is close to an all-time high in the United States, it's wise to assess access, opportunity, and will, and ask ourselves as educators, "Are we doing enough?"

We spotted antelope, bison, and snow-capped peaks as our van traveled between Colorado and Wyoming. The area used to be known as the western frontier, but we were there to see something else - one of the fastest computers in the world – a technological frontier.

Last week, ten of us from the UCAR Center for Science Education and NCAR visited a supercomputer housed on the prairie west of Cheyenne at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.

This week I got a message from Kimberley, a 7th grade student working on a science project to teach her classmates about the atmosphere. “I was wondering if you could give me any concepts, ideas, or activities that might interest my classmates,” she wrote. “Also if you know any websites I could look up that would be great.”

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Foret shared a childhood story that made an excellent point about communicating science to the public. He was speaking at the Education Symposium of the Annual Meeting of the American Meteorology Society in Austin, Texas.

In the scientific sense, climate normal is the average of the past 30 years of data about temperature, precipitation and other aspects of weather. Climate is what’s normal, what’s typical, what you’d expect. Yet, we now have a new normal for climate. If you average the past 30 years of temperature data you will have a higher number of degrees than if you average an earlier 30 years of data. Climate is changing, which means normal is changing, at least in the scientific sense. We have a new baseline.

Staff head to the American Meteorological Society's 93rd Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas in early January. After a year of weather extremes, there won't be any lulls in the program for scientists and educators in attendance, but the public can take part, too!

Earlier this month, after hopping into a cab in San Francisco, the driver asked me what kind of work I do. “Science!” I replied. What followed was a strange yet candid conversation about what this cab driver thought a scientist should look like. He and I did not see eye-to-eye about this, but the short ride was amusing.

Did you see the total solar eclipse on Tuesday? No? Why not? Was it because you weren't in Northern Australia? Yeah, that's where it could be seen.
But wait! I saw it and I wasn't in Australia. In fact, I'm looking at it right now. Yes, I am boasting. And, no, it is not still going on. I can look at the eclipse by looking at my computer thanks to oodles of people who took photos and video of the eclipse happening and posted them online.

Join UCAR Center for Science Education educators and the teachers we work with at the Colorado Science Conference for Professional Development, November 16, 2012 at the Denver Merchandise Mart. We'll be highlighting how weather and climate science from the National Center for Atmospheric Research can make its way into secondary education.

Records set during the Olympics by fast swimmers and runners and all sorts of other athletes were exciting. They made people jump out of seats in living rooms around the world and cheer. But records set by our planet are another story. Those make me uneasy.

Melting sea ice doesn’t cause sea level to rise because the ice is already in the ocean, but it does cause other changes to the planet. When sea ice melts, more sunlight is absorbed by the Earth, which causes more warming. It’s a vicious cycle. And here’s how it works.

In the Arctic Ocean, autumn doesn’t mean colorful leaves or harvesting pumpkins and apples. It means that the ice bobbing atop the sea around the North Pole is at its minimum after melting through the summer. This autumn, new records are being set for the minimum amount of sea ice in the Arctic.

By Annareli Morales, SOARS Protégé
It's not every day that you get to tour expensive and advanced research aircraft that fly high and low through hurricanes, winter cyclones, and thunderstorms all around the globe.
Last week some fellow SOARS protégés and I toured NCAR’s Research Aviation Facility.

By Monika Wnuk, UCAR Intern. Under the wing of their project mentor, Kristina Peterson, SOARS protégés Sandra Maina and Frances Roberts-Gregory spent their first weeks at late-night dinners, Masses, even shrimping with shrimpers, all for the sake of gaining trust from the community they would rely on for their research.

By Andre Perkins, SOARS Protégé. A curious cloud is visible in the rearview mirror. It’s much lower than any of the other cumulus puffs at the top of daytime thermals. Why is it so low? Is it coming from the mountains? I had never seen the effects of a wildfire in person before June 9th, 2012 when the High Park ignited to the west of Fort Collins, CO.

By Stanley Edwin, SOARS Protégé. I could still see some of the smoke in the hills above Boulder when I returned from a science workshop in New Mexico. This told me how close the fire came to Boulder. As a former forest firefighter in Alaska, I have a little more experience with fires than most college students, so when I first heard about the fire encroaching on Boulder, I decided to reassure my SOARS friends that everything would be fine.

By Curtis Walker, SOARS Protégé. Last winter, much of the U.S. saw above average temperatures and less snowfall than usual. Months later the price is being paid in the form of wildfire, an unpredictable and untamable force of nature.

By Curtis Walker, SOARS Protégé. On Friday, June 1, 2012, I joined my research mentors for a meeting to discuss the details of my SOARS 2012 Project. They mentioned that this summer I would be working with NASCAR, but they didn’t tell me that I would have the opportunity to go to my first race!

I spent an afternoon at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, California. Everywhere I looked, kids and adults were playing with things, experimenting, trying one idea or another. I watched a guy spin a small ball on a rotating table and a 3-year-old play with a pendulum. What they weren’t doing, though, was reading – at least, not much.

Satellite images of the Southeastern Louisiana coast are mostly dark with green capillaries blossoming into lace strands that branch again and again into the surrounding blackness. The satellite images hint at the history of the land, its slow sinking.

One of my favorite bumper-stickers reads, don’t believe everything you think. Science is built on applying this sentiment. Doing science requires not quite believing things until you test them - over and over again.

We are pleased to host part of a multimedia exhibit called “the invisible connectedness of things” by artist Kim Abeles at the NCAR Mesa Lab. If you are in or near Boulder, Colorado, we hope you visit.

We hope the new name for our science education group hints at our goals. We want to spark interest in science, ignite careers in research and careers that solve real-world problems using research results. And we hope to launch collaborative relationships between communities and scientists.